OpenAI Claims Elon Musk Wanted Absolute Control of the Company

OpenAI has responded to Elon Musk’s lawsuit by saying that, at one point, he sought “absolute control” of the company by merging it with Tesla. OpenAI released a post sharing its intention to dismiss “all of Elon’s claims” and offered its counter-perspective to his claim that the company had discarded its initial nonprofit mission.

Elon Musk’s Lawsuit Against OpenAI

Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and an early supporter of OpenAI, filed a lawsuit alleging that the organization, once a champion of AI for the benefit of humanity, has abandoned its nonprofit mission. Musk claimed that OpenAI has transformed into a profit-oriented entity to Microsoft.

On the contrary, OpenAI countered Musk’s accusations by highlighting his purpose for merging the company with Tesla or his desire for “absolute control” over the company. This also includes majority equity, board dominance, and the position of CEO, as mentioned by OpenAI’s co-founders Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Sam Altman, and Wojciech Zaremba. 

OpenAI revealed, “We couldn’t agree to terms on a for-profit with Elon because we felt it was against the mission for any individual to have absolute control over OpenAI.”

OpenAI’s Stand on Open-Sourcing

Responding to Musk’s claim regarding OpenAI’s shift away from open-sourcing its work, the organization clarified that the mission of advancing AI did not imply open-sourcing artificial general intelligence (AGI). The organization published an email exchange in January 2016. Sutskever said, “As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open,” and that “it’s OK not to share the science.” Musk replied: “Yup.”

Elon Musk’s lawsuit has a few other puzzling allegations, like the claim that GPT-4 is essentially a Microsoft-owned algorithm representing AGI. Although OpenAI had previously refuted these allegations in an internal memo, it did not specifically address them in its public blog post.

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